Madeleine McCann: Christian Brückner bragged about masturbating naked in 'room full of sleeping teen girls'
Christian Brückner, the convicted German pedophile who is now the prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, once bragged about performing a sex act in "a room full of sleeping teenage girls", a close friend has claimed. Madeleine was just three-years-old when she went missing from her bed in a holiday apartment at a resort in Praia da Luz, in the Algarve region of Portugal on the evening of May 3. She had been vacationing with her parents and infant siblings, and her disappearance sparked an international manhunt and investigation.
Brückner, 43, was announced as a suspect in the case by Germany's Federal Criminal Police (BKA) this past June. It was revealed that he had been in the Praia da Luz region on the night Madeleine disappeared and that he had a long history of sex crimes and other violent offenses.
Several of his acquaintances and friends have since come out to share disturbing patterns of behavior that they saw in the 43-year-old, with one now telling the Mirror of how he allegedly boasted about masturbating in front of teenage girls after breaking into their apartment.
Referring to Brückner's record of break-ins and robberies, the friend, who did not wish to be identified, said, "We never thought his crimes involved children – he was a kleptomaniac. We just thought he stole everything in sight. He told me what he got up to when he lived in Portugal. He said he had been surviving by breaking into hotel rooms, stealing cameras and laptops.".
However, he said he realized Brückner's crimes extended far beyond just stealing after he told him about another one of his break-ins. "The strangest thing he ever told me was about breaking into a room where four teenagers from Britain were sleeping on the sofa and floor," he said.
"He was naked and had left his clothes outside and he was masturbating," he continued. "When one woke up and tried to wake the others up he panicked and ran out. He said he ran naked through the town. He told it like a funny story."
The friend also revealed how he initially came to meet Brückner at a kiosk the German owned in Braunschweig, North Germany, in 2013. "We used to drink in a back room. He talked about his crimes and was kind of proud about it," he said.
Asked why he was coming forward with this information now, the friend said he had seen the police's raids on an allotment where he previously lived and found an underground cellar. He said he wasn't sure if the masturbation incident happened in Praia da Luz, but that he believes it was in the same area.
Investigators from the Braunschweig prosecutor's office and Federal Crime Police Office in Germany launched a search operation at an allotment in Seelze, Hanover, this past week after they were tipped that it had once been home to Brückner.
Witnesses at the scene described police lifting a cement block covering the basement during the first day of digging and of a sniffer dog barking as it entered. It was later reported that the 43-year-old had dug another 10-foot-deep cellar under a second allotment in Braunschweig which is around 40 miles from the Hanover plot
Brückner is currently in jail for a string for drug-related offenses and has also waiting to serve another sentence for the rape of a woman in her 70s in 2005.